"Fall Sticks in the Craw," by Hans Ostrom

Fall sticks in the craw like the n
in autumn.
It's the season of anxiety attacks,
layoffs,
ritual remarks about leaves and
crisp air, unholy holidays:

Halloween's become an anomalous
appendage,
Thanksgiving a clot of travel and a
ghastly food-orgy.

The cafes start serving
goddamned pumpkin-milkshakes
they still
call "coffee-drinks."

I shouldn't be so negative.
Or I should be
more negative: indecision in
post-equinox days.

True, it's a good time
to get food
to people who have little,
so that's an opportunity.

A Day, A Season

(Mainz, Germany)



At dusk suddenly shrubs
blacken like over-ripe fruit.

Cries of children playing
soccer diminish. In last light,

women walk dogs in the park
before winos shuffle in,

rustling like cockroaches.
These and other gestures

of light, air, traffic, hunger,
routine, and business seem this

evening profound enough to be
called seasonal. The evening

seems large. There was the solitary
dying sunflower in the old woman's

garden today. Its sagging head
looked tragically rotten. Its

sad, dappled leaves hung like the fins
of a beached sea-mammal. Old

people boarding the bus now
in Mainz-Bretzenheim climb

into gray light. The bus
groans away from the curb.



hans ostrom 1980/2013

Fall's Always Good for a Laugh

A large, allegedly evolved primate,

he passed through an exterior door

of his abode, intending to gather

a newspaper on the stoop (this

was in the last days of print-culture),

and he was caught in a spider’s web.

Webbing on his face, he looked

at the fat brown spider as it danced

like a portly Vaudevillian on its

filament, and he laughed.


hans ostrom 2013